Charney 2010 Literary Culture Burma

[Draft version of paper published as Charney, Michael W. (2011) 'Literary Culture on the Burma–Manipur Frontier in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.' The Medieval History Journal, 14 (2). pp. 159-181] Literary Culture on the Burma-Manipur Frontier in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries By Michael W. Charney1 (School of Oriental and African Studies) How far literary culture in history can be examined depends upon collections of source material that is often less generous to the periphery than to the political center. It is true that the Orientalism debate has made scholars more sensitive to non-Western voices and Subaltern Studies has raised interest among historians in the local and the everyday.2 Nevertheless, there has been less concern for locating and listening to voices outside of the political center. Literary history, outside of Europe at least, is still located in dynastic or regnal space, authors slotted into particular reigns that are rendered meaningful in a literary or cultural sense by particularly significant works, 1 The author would like to thank Dr. Atsuko Naono (Warwick) and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft, Indrani Chatterjee (Rutgers) and Ramya Sreenivasan (SUNY Buffalo) for organizing the panel at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting (2009) at which that draft was presented and for related discussion there, and Professor Victor B. Lieberman (Michigan) for helpful discussions in other contexts on some of the themes discussed in the present article. 2 Sheldon Pollock, Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 12-13. 1 while the regional identity of important elements of literary culture is generally ignored.3 Nevertheless, literary history also presents an intersection of the personal life histories of the authors and hence can thus incorporate biographical details that lend us hints of a broader world of people, places, and ideas that together form literary culture, however much their details escape or are hidden in this interstitial space by the state-centered narratives. Additionally, in Burma, a strong biographical tradition that probably stems from the importance in society of monasticism and driven by the demonstration of the accrual of merit by important monks has provided a model for indigenous scholars of literati that has produced highly detailed accounts of major writers, although at the sacrifice of very little detail on their writings save for the titles of major works.4 Strengthened by such detailed biography, a simultaneously broader and yet nuanced approach to literary culture is relevant to everything outside of the political center, but perhaps especially to those areas most distant from it, the subject of this article, borderlands. By heeding the call of scholars of borderlands to reverse the examination of border studies from the “view of the center” to “a view from the periphery,”5 we find cultures that can complicate the state-centered narrative of literary history. Our work would seem to be that much easier in the relatively few cases in which the literary culture of the periphery first becomes that of the center and then of a national imaginary, allowing us an unusually privileged glimpse of frontier 3 See, for example, Pe Maung Tin, Myanma Sa-pei Thamaing (Rangoon: Thudhammawaddy Press, 1995). 4 See, for example, U Ba Thein, “A Dictionary of Burmese Authors,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 10.3 (1920): 120-154. 5 Michiel Baud & Willem van Schendel, “Toward a Comparative history of Borderlands,” Journal of World History 8.2 (Fall 1997): 212. 2 perspectives on literary culture. One such case, the focus of this article, is that of the monks and lay literati of Konbaung Burma’s Sudhamma Reformation. It is difficult to give a precise starting point for this period although it was in full force during the 1790s and first decade of the nineteenth century. It witnessed the rise of a regional clique of monastic and lay literati, who for convenience will be referred to here as the Chindwin scholars, from the frontier with Manipur along the Chindwin River to the commanding positions in Burma’s monastic hierarchy, state ministerial echelons, and royal army. The Chindwin scholars admittedly owed some of their continuing influence to factors that had little or nothing to do with the control of literature per se. Their potential importance to the state owed much to changing demographic and economic circumstances that favored the Lower Chindwin. Further, their movement from the frontier to the royal court was also aided by the fact that the princely appanage of the new king, Bodawhpaya (r. 1782-1819), was located on the Chindwin and when he came to the court, he brought his locally recruited entourage with him. Afterward, these men remained heavily connected through marriage and birth with the royal service communities in the Chindwin from whom were drawn the main corps of the royal army. The comprehensiveness of their domination over state institutions, however, ensured that they exercised considerable influence over the king himself who depended upon them as much as vice versa.6 These Chindwin scholars can be understood in two ways relative to literary culture, overlapping but not confined by the world of written texts. First, as members 6 The developments are examined in Michael W. Charney, Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma’s Last Dynasty, 1752-1885 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 2006). 3 of a Buddhist textual community,7 the monastics among them had privileged claims to authority over religious texts and thus claims to authority over religious knowledge which they sought to strengthen by cultivating their command of texts. On occasion they demonstrated their authority over religious texts and knowledge by their success in presenting their monastic competitors as sham monks in monastic debates before the court and elsewhere. In seeming irony, they defeated monastic opponents in part by demeaning the oral transmission of texts from teacher to students amongst their competitors while attracting royal support through their own oral recitation of the Pali canon, demonstrating in part that there is more to literary culture than things written. With the king’s cooperation, Chindwin monks launched the Reformation, reforming the religion and eliminating rival monastic sects, making them the most senior and powerful of monks in a unified monastic order. Having persecuted and defrocked the their rivals and establishing themselves as the orthodox sect, they remained the only sect recognized by the state until the mid-nineteenth century. From local perspectives and the activities and writings of these Chindwin scholars, it is clear that Chindwin scholars were also part of another broader intellectual world and their scholarly network, at least in certain contexts, was open enough to include as well non-Buddhist peoples and cultures along the Chindwin area. In particular, Manipuri Brahmins played a significant role in shaping the perspectives of and cooperating in the literary activities of Chindwin-based Buddhist scholars and laypeople. Nevertheless, the narrative structures of Burmese histories left 7 I adapt here the use of the term to reflect the orientation of lay and monastic individuals to the interpretation of a shared set of oral or written texts as put forward in Anne M. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001): 12. 4 behind by the chief ideologues of the Sudhamma Reformation worked to limit reference to this broader scholarly network, to hide the local nature of the literate culture of which they and the Brahmins were a part, and indeed to hide their activities at the court generally behind the images of orthodox Buddhism centred on linkages with Sri Lanka and a strong court under a traditional, powerful dhamma-raja. This article attempts to ferret out another story, one of a local literary culture and its participants on the Burma-Manipur frontier, by re-reading some of the state-centered sources left by the Chindwin scholars, Manipuri chronicles, local Chindwin texts, and other sources. It may seem likely that literary culture would be more susceptible to political control because all Southeast Asian writers, viewed through the prism of older scholarship on local intellectual history, were dependent on royal patronage. Hence, they wrote for the court, lived in the court, and, unless they did something unbecoming and were banished, the texts they wrote would contribute to a permanent corpus of court literature kept in the royal library until, of course, the British or some other European power came to drag these texts away to collections in the metropole. Scholars of precolonial Southeast Asian history have overemphasized the agency of the king, or instead assume that the state and its wings reflected solely the will of the ruler. By identifying the king or “the court” in the singular as the primary agent of change, conventional historiography on Burma (and Southeast Asia) has compressed knowledge production into an uncomplicated process of king-directed action. In this way, the premodern Burmese state as the arm of the king and the production of central histories, religious texts, and other literature has been taken simply as a royal project. As a result, the acquisition of Sanskrit texts has been conventionally attributed to the king’s political designs on India. His efforts to use missions to 5 acquire Sanskrit texts from India were taken merely as cover for a design to form an alliance of disenchanted Indian rulers to oust the British from India.8 In recent decades, more literature has come to light and creative hands have been located in the shadowy outlands of early modern states, at work without and sometimes against the royal court.

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